‘Mad Dog’ Mattis and the Spirit of Trumpism

When it comes to foreign policy, the incoming Trump administration displays
a split personality. This was readily apparent during the campaign, when, on
the one hand, Donald Trump told us we were lied into the Iraq war, that NATO
is “obsolete,” and that we have no business supporting regime change in Syria
– and, on the other hand, he declared that he would crush ISIS, that it was
a mistake to leave Iraq, and that we have to “rebuild our military,” as if we
don’t already spend as much as the top ten defense spenders. It was a combination
of “isolationist” rhetoric and belligerent bombast – surely an odd combination
(albeit not one without precedent in our history, but we’ll get to that later).

We are seeing this ambiguity play out in the process of the Trump transition,
as national security slots are slowly filled. Mike Flynn, a three-star general
and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, exemplifies this Janus-faced
persona: in Flynn’s interview
with Al Jazeera, interviewer Mehdi Hasan remarked “There’s a dove General
Flynn and there’s a hawk
General Flynn,” and this applies not only to Trump himself but also to his latest
appointee, Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, chosen for Secretary of Defense.

A retired four-star Marine Corps general, former commander of CENTCOM, Mattis
commanded the Marines during the invasion of Iraq, and also served as Supreme
Allied Commander of NATO (2007-09). Mattis is idolized by many and feared by
some. The Cato Institute’s Christopher Preble, a staunch anti-interventionist,
sees him as a restraining
influence on our new commander-in-chief: “[W]ithin the Trump administration he
could be a critical voice of caution with respect to the wisdom or
folly of the use of force going forward.” Preble cites Mattis as saying:

“As I look back over these wars since World War II – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,
dare I say Afghanistan, stick Somalia in there somewhere, other expeditions
– when America goes to war with murky political end states, then you end up
in a situation where you are trying to do something right, but you’re not
sure if it’s the right thing. And suddenly you end up with a situation where
the American people say ‘what are we doing here?’ And ‘what kind of people are
we that we do this sort of thing?’

“If you don’t know what it is that you’re going to achieve, then don’t be
surprised that eventually you’ve wasted treasure, lives, and the moral authority
of the United States.”

According to several reports, Gen.Mattis’s favorite reprise to those who advocate
some form of military intervention is “And then what?”

It turns out that Mattis opposed – or, at least, privately questioned – the
Iraq war, as a
new report in The Intercept has it.

But neither is Mattis a peacenik, or even an America First-type “isolationist.”
They don’t call him “Mad Dog” for nothing.

This
report in Politico characterizes him as holding a longstanding “grudge”
against Iran:

“Mattis has embraced the Marine Corps’ longstanding grievance against Iran,
one that goes back to the 1980s.

“In fact, Mattis’ anti-Iran animus is so intense that it led President Barack
Obama to replace him as Centcom commander. It was a move that roiled Mattis
admirers, seeding claims that the president didn’t like ‘independent-minded
generals who speak candidly to their civilian leaders.’ But Mattis’ Iran antagonism
also concerns many of the Pentagon’s most senior officers, who disagree with
his assessment and openly worry whether his Iran views are based on a sober
analysis or whether he’s simply reflecting a 30-plus-year-old hatred of the
Islamic Republic that is unique to his service. It’s a situation that could
lead to disagreement within the Pentagon over the next four years – but also,
senior Pentagon officials fear, to war.

“’It’s in his blood,’ one senior Marine officer told me.‘It’s
almost like he wants to get even with them.’”

The source of this decades-long grudge is, of course, the 1983 Beirut
bombing by an Iranian-trained operative that killed 241 Americans: 220 of
those killed were Marines. Iranian actions in the Gulf in the 1980s, as well
as in post-invasion Iraq, added to the animus.

If it comes to a crisis in which the possibility of war with Iran is raised,
will Gen. Mattis, as Defense Secretary, have the objectivity to ask “And then
what?”

We don’t know the answer to that question, just as we don’t know what the response
of Gen. Flynn, now Trump’s National Security Advisor, will be, because Flynn,
too, has it in for Tehran, which he sees as part of a global anti-American alliance
that includes countries as widely separated as North Korea and Venezuela. Yes,
really.

There are, roughly, three factions within the US military and national security
bureaucracy, each with their own view of the principal threat to the US at the
present moment. Under the Obama administration, the dominant faction has seen
the Russians as the number one worry for US policymakers. Russia, after all,
is armed with nuclear weapons, and the Russophobes have been pretty active lately,
pointing to Crimea, Ukraine, and Putin’s supposedly threatening moves along
the Polish and Baltic fronts. And what with the recent accusations that Moscow
is “interfering” in our elections, with the Clinton campaign going so far as
to malign Trump as a Russian “puppet” – the kind of charge not heard even during
the most frigid years of the cold war – this position takes on a political as
well as a geo-strategic coloration.

The other view is that Iran is the main danger, while a third faction holds
that “VEOs” – violent extremist organizations, such as ISIS and al-Qaeda – are
the biggest threat. It seems, at least from what I’ve observed over the past
year or so, that Trump himself holds to this latter view, while Mattis adheres
to the former, and Flynn is somewhere in between.

Trump’s campaign slogan, “America First,” gives us a broad hint of what to
expect of his foreign policy – and a way to interpret his own statements, as
well as his appointments. So let’s go back and look at what the old America
First Committee – the biggest peace movement in American history – stood for.

Organized by a group of conservative businessmen to oppose US entry into World
War II, and joined by nearly a million rank-and-file members, their
four-point program read as follows;

“1) The United States must build an impregnable defense for America.

“2) No foreign power, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared
America.

“3) American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European
war.

4) ‘Aid short of war’ weakens national defense at home and threatens to
involve America in war abroad.”

Note the order: the notion of military preparedness comes first and second,
with opposition to entry into the European war third and fourth. The leader
of the AFC was Gen. Robert E. Wood, with
a history of military service nearly as long and distinguished as that of Gen.
Mattis. He was certainly no pacifist. The AFC routinely billed its rallies as
“Peace and Preparedness Mass Meetings,” and the same emphasis on a strong military
came across in the public statements of its leaders and the Committee’s publications.

The original America Firsters lost out. The current ones aren’t replicas of
the originals, but they come out of that tradition, whether they know it or
not. It is an ambiguous legacy, one with both Jacksonian and Jeffersonian roots,
to utilize Walter Russell Meade’s categories
of foreign policy thought: how it plays out in the context of the twenty-first
century is subject to a number of factors, some of them unknowable.

What all this means for the future is by no means certain: however, it is far
better than what we have come to expect from the liberal internationalists.
If we were anticipating their reign, under a restored Clinton regime, we would
know for sure what to expect: war on every front.

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NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets
are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist
of me thinking out loud.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo